Top Reads from Oakland Local this week « Oakland Local

We had one of those weeks at Oakland Local that forces us to reexamine and reaffirm our role as a hyper-local news and community platform. Right now, in real time, neighborhoods across Oakland are negotiating changing identities. These negotiations are in property lease biddings and between tenants and landlords; between cyclists, cars, buses and pedestrians; between suspicious people, the people they find suspicious and cops; these negotiations are in the smells of aloogosht from the tenants’ kitchen on the second floor mingling with the smells of jerk chicken on the third floor; they are in offices of City Council members and on front porches in the moment a new neighbor approaches to introduce herself. And they are here, in online forums.